Optimism Abounds at AMD as Zen Flexes Its Performance Muscles

[Blín D'ñero]

On Wednesday evening, just a stone’s throw away from where Intel was holding its developer forum in San Francisco, AMD was previewing its upcoming Zen CPU to an audience of analysts and reporters. Zen is AMD’s newest x86 microarchitecture, which is in line replace the older Bulldozer design. At the event, the company demonstrated an 8-core version of chip outrunning an Intel Broadwell CPU on Blender, a multi-threaded rendering application.

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Zen’s better performance is derived from a completely revamped core design and 14nm FinFET technology. That combination enables the new processor to deliver a 40 percent improvement in instructions per clock cycle compared to the previous generation Excavator platform, AMD’s final revision of the Bulldozer architecture. Zen also incorporates better branch prediction, as well as an enhanced cache set-up, consisting of a larger L2 cache and a new 8MB L3 cache.

Read full article at source (top500.org)